Thursday, 19 July 2012

Slender shares a lot with Halloween. It has the same disturbing elegance. Every playthrough starts off in the same way. You switch on a torch in the middle of a forest in the dead of night, and you’re instructed to collect 8 pages of a scattered manuscript. There’s no mini-map or compass to guide your search, so you fumble across the terrain, getting lost, getting turned around. Occasionally you come across an ominous landmark – an abandoned pickup, four intersecting brickwalls, a building with white tiles lining its corridors.

These isolated structures emerge from out of the darkness, simultaneously offering safety – a site of civilisation amongst the empty woodland – but also a place where danger lurks; this is where you find the manuscript pages. Once you collect your first page, a sinister thumping begins that never stops. It throbs ominously. Something out in the darkness has been alerted to your presence. You’re being watched. And followed.

The Slender Man, like Myers, can’t be reasoned with. And the game’s controls are so limited you can’t plead or even attack. You can only run, terrified, through the darkness, until you’re out of breath and hopelessly disorientated.

The game is so effective because of a simple psychological ploy. The Slender Man will never spontaneously appear in front of you. (At least he never has in one my playthroughs.) So, to avoid being caught, the imperative is simple: Don’t Look Now. But the temptation to look behind you, to check that he’s not gaining ground, is overwhelming. Like so many works of horror, Slender punishes curiosity.